My first book...
It’s dedicated to the notion that teaching everything like an arts class can create transformative learning experiences for students,
with more personalization,
with more opportunities for individual exploration
and with the inclusion of critical design, more opportunities to unleash creativity, reflection, and engagement with the public.
It’s partly an investigation of how artists create work, partly a history of how I tried to teach my students to be arts-based researchers,
and partly a dialogue between me and my students.
Buy it here, among other places
It’s dedicated to the notion that teaching everything like an arts class can create transformative learning experiences for students,
with more personalization,
with more opportunities for individual exploration
and with the inclusion of critical design, more opportunities to unleash creativity, reflection, and engagement with the public.
It’s partly an investigation of how artists create work, partly a history of how I tried to teach my students to be arts-based researchers,
and partly a dialogue between me and my students.
Buy it here, among other places
Review, from "Summer is Prime Time for PBL Remodeling" on Edutopia
"[Werberger's] PBL reflections caused him to ask tough questions: What's the right line between teacher direction and student freedom? Is it OK for students to swerve toward new questions -- unanticipated by the teacher -- that grab their curiosity? How open is too open?
In true PBL style, Werberger designed a project to help him discover the answers with his students. He and his ninth-grade students at Darrow School spent an entire school year on an interdisciplinary project about fast food. They didn't just study fast food as a way to understand global economics, agricultural practices, marketing, or health. They recreated their own version of the McDonald's Happy Meal by hand-raising livestock, growing crops, making paper for packaging, and serving lunch to a community gathering while curating the whole learning experience with an artist's sensibility.
Werberger has documented the project in a provocative book, From Project-Based Learning to Artistic Thinking: Lessons Learned from Creating an Un-Happy Meal.
To be honest, few teachers -- or schools -- are going to be in a position to tackle such an ambitious, immersive, open-ended project. But the questions Werberger explores, and the documentation he shares -- from his own journal and his students' blogs -- are worth careful consideration by anyone interested in maximizing the opportunities of PBL and its close cousin, design thinking.
Teachers wondering how to facilitate student-driven learning will find a good role model. For example, Werberger writes, "I cast myself as a learner first, and we all worked together on the problem of how not just to make this food, but how to give it meaning, and then how to tell you about it."
A key design decision was to have students approach the project as artists. Werberger didn't want to treat art as an add-on to the project, but rather to have students "consider art as a form of thinking. Artists ask, 'How does this affect me? How can I explain what I see to others?' The work that is created is an attempt to explore these questions, not to answer them."
Although the Un-Happy Meal Project takes open-ended learning to an extreme, students are not just set adrift. From project launch to their final exhibition, we can see the teacher artfully guiding and scaffolding the learning experience. Werberger describes in detail how he built a classroom culture of peer critique. He shares the prompts he used to get students to assess their own growth. Even when students are working on disparate tasks, they move to familiar rhythms because of established classroom routines...
Teachers diving into project remodeling would be wise to consider Werberger's questions for thinking about final products: Will students love what they have created? Where will this go when it's done? Will it make the world a better or more beautiful place?"
"[Werberger's] PBL reflections caused him to ask tough questions: What's the right line between teacher direction and student freedom? Is it OK for students to swerve toward new questions -- unanticipated by the teacher -- that grab their curiosity? How open is too open?
In true PBL style, Werberger designed a project to help him discover the answers with his students. He and his ninth-grade students at Darrow School spent an entire school year on an interdisciplinary project about fast food. They didn't just study fast food as a way to understand global economics, agricultural practices, marketing, or health. They recreated their own version of the McDonald's Happy Meal by hand-raising livestock, growing crops, making paper for packaging, and serving lunch to a community gathering while curating the whole learning experience with an artist's sensibility.
Werberger has documented the project in a provocative book, From Project-Based Learning to Artistic Thinking: Lessons Learned from Creating an Un-Happy Meal.
To be honest, few teachers -- or schools -- are going to be in a position to tackle such an ambitious, immersive, open-ended project. But the questions Werberger explores, and the documentation he shares -- from his own journal and his students' blogs -- are worth careful consideration by anyone interested in maximizing the opportunities of PBL and its close cousin, design thinking.
Teachers wondering how to facilitate student-driven learning will find a good role model. For example, Werberger writes, "I cast myself as a learner first, and we all worked together on the problem of how not just to make this food, but how to give it meaning, and then how to tell you about it."
A key design decision was to have students approach the project as artists. Werberger didn't want to treat art as an add-on to the project, but rather to have students "consider art as a form of thinking. Artists ask, 'How does this affect me? How can I explain what I see to others?' The work that is created is an attempt to explore these questions, not to answer them."
Although the Un-Happy Meal Project takes open-ended learning to an extreme, students are not just set adrift. From project launch to their final exhibition, we can see the teacher artfully guiding and scaffolding the learning experience. Werberger describes in detail how he built a classroom culture of peer critique. He shares the prompts he used to get students to assess their own growth. Even when students are working on disparate tasks, they move to familiar rhythms because of established classroom routines...
Teachers diving into project remodeling would be wise to consider Werberger's questions for thinking about final products: Will students love what they have created? Where will this go when it's done? Will it make the world a better or more beautiful place?"
More Reviews:
"There is much to appreciate in the account of this school project, even to those who are not educators. It is an affirmation of the importance of arts education and encouraging development of twenty-first-century skills." (VOYA)
“Raleigh Werberger’s Unhappy Meals Project draws on a clear and powerful idea—deconstruction and recreation of a familiar item—as a thread to follow in an unbounded, cross-disciplinary, and uncertain expedition into the complexity of the modern world. With his Unhappy Meals Project, Raleigh Werberger has turned my Toaster Project into something teachable in a classroom.
I’ve followed Raleigh’s project since its inception, and seen how his students followed threads wherever they’ve led (including to rearing and slaughtering their own chickens!). In doing so they gained an appreciation of the complexity (and wonder) in everyday things, but more importantly, they’ve been able to experience what it’s like to feel motivated to learn, in order to try and make something you care about happen.” (Thomas Thwaites, author of The Toaster Project and GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human)
“This is an extraordinary account of a year-long 9th grade course where students learn artistic thinking by exploring and recreating components of a McDonald’s “Happy Meal.” It is also a wonderfully wise meditation on the nature of real learning. An exceptional teacher, writer, and thinker, Raleigh Werberger has made a unique contribution to the literature of progressive education.” (Tony Wagner, author of The Global Achievement Gap and Creating Innovators and the recent documentary “Most Likely to Succeed”)
“This book is a rare treat—an in-depth investigation into the inner workings of a PBL project from the viewpoint of the teacher and students, who together test out the theories of the experts. How well does PBL work? What are the gaps? Can deep thinking be assessed? How do we hold art in the present day curriculum? And does PBL help us reinvent progressive arts education? These are several of the questions explored in the book as a class of 9th graders guide themselves—and the teacher—through an UnHappy Meal project that turns into a very happy learning experience.” (Thom Markham, founder of PBL Global, formerly of Envision Schools and the Buck Institute for Education, author of Project Based Learning Design and Coaching Guide: Expert tools for innovation and inquiry for K–12 teachers)
“An inspiring tale of pedagogical innovation from the ground-up and a practical guide to engaging students in creative learning.” (Yong Zhao, PhD,presidential chair, director, Institute of Global and Online Education, professor, department of Eeducational methodology, policy, and leadership, College of Education, University of Oregon, author of World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students, Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China has the Best (and worst) Education in the World)
Art saves lives in transforming the most complex problems and difficulties inaccessible to conventional thinking. It can save schools too by renewing their missions and the necessary partnership between subjective and empirical realms in a world where all things are interconnected and where the intelligence of creative imagination flourishes only by engaging it all. Raleigh Werberger has written an inspiring, transparent, and convincing book grounded in the practice of teaching and the authority of experience. It is just what we need to unleash progressive practice in education in this era of standardized outcomes. Depth of learning and discovery, together with the acquisition of the most rudimentary and lasting skills, can only be achieved by arousing and cultivating the passion and desire for experimentation, understanding, and expression, where artistic and scientific inquiry complement one another. The author models this process perfectly in his reflective journal entries where he makes his “own thinking visible” and then communicates his challenges to students to evoke their responses. My hope is that this book will contribute to easing and maybe even putting an end to the extreme fluctuation of educational trends and ideologies that pervade contemporary life and move us closer to the true basics, the mainstream of teaching and learning grounded in the creative process. (Shaun McNiff, professor, Lesley University Cambridge, MA and author of many books including Art-Based Research (1998), Art as Research (2013) and Imagination in Action (2015))